Thomas Telford

Thomas Telford was a Scottish civil engineer whose infrastructure projects reshaped transportation across Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He built roughly forty bridges in Shropshire alone and designed the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, completed in 1805 and running more than a thousand feet across the Dee valley, as well as the Menai Suspension Bridge, completed in 1826 with a span of 580 feet that was the longest of its time. His canal work included the Caledonian Canal along Scotland's Great Glen and a redesign of the Crinan Canal, and he oversaw reconstruction of roughly 920 miles of road in the Scottish Highlands and the London to Holyhead road. In 1820 he became the founding president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a post he held until his death in 1834, and his prolific output earned him the nickname the Colossus of Roads, a pun on the ancient Colossus of Rhodes.